Major Project Progress

After my third reading of the chapter The Counterfeit Infinity: The Use and Abuse of Psychadelic Experience from Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition Roszak's ideals have become increasingly prevalent. Roszak highlights the basis of his view in the first chapter, stating that "psychedelic experience participates significantly in the young's most radical rejection of the parental society. Yet it is their frantic search for the pharmacological panacea which tends to distract many of the young from all that is most valuable in their rebellion, and which threatens to destroy their most promising sensibilities." Here, Roszak identifies that the core reason for drug use in the 60s is merely "rejection of the parental society" and states a similar opinion to DeGroot by identifying drug use as an obstacle which inhibits counter cultural progress. Roszak goes on to acknowledge the stated motive of the counter cultural leaders "if we accept the proposition that the counter culture is, essentially, an exploration of the politics of consciousness." However, Roszak highlights the feebleness of such an attempt as "a limited chemical means to a greater psychic end,"

Roszak establishes his opinion of drug use in the 60s as a corrupting, menacing force quite early in the text, "they have been sucked into the undertow of a major social movement-and in this context, their influence has been far from wholesome." Roszak states his opinion that although the psychedelic experience and higher "political consciousness" would be beneficial to intellectuals, it is wasted on the youth movement. "the experience has... been laid hold of by a generation of youngsters who are pathetically a-cultural and who often bring nothing to the experience but a vacuous yearning." Roszak goes on to make prolific statements about the 60s youth, dismissing the counter cultural movement as purely recreational and selfish. Roszak goes as far as to condemn 60s drug users as "a giddy child out to 'blow his mind'." This view is further explored as Roszak dismisses the political and religious components of the psychedelic experience stating that, "for them, psychic chemistry is no longer a means for exploring the perennial wisdom; it has become an end in itself, a source of boundless lore, study and esthetic elaboration." Hence, drug use in the 60s is recorded not as an existential religious experience but rather as the chaotic degradation of humanity. It is shown in his history to be mere youthful decadence, hidden behind the mask of a "greater meaning". The 60s youth were "trying strenuously to inflate the psychedelics to the size of an entire culture."

Roszak goes as far as to state that the psychedelic movement was a reflection of the very American commercialism which it aims to reject. He provides clear examples of how the media and advertising world latched onto the youthful counter culture through a "narrow obsession with psychedelic problems and paraphernalia." He shows how the psychedelic experience was exploited as a target audience with the media "more dependent on a local hip economy most of whose wares... are designed to be perceived through a narcotic haze, or... go a long way toward glamorising the psychedelics, deepening the fascination or the need." How is it possible that the psychedelic experience could be both a selfless movement aimed toward heightening religious understanding and instigating political consciousness and a commercialised media outlet? Was the 60s drug culture merely a gluttonous, selfish experience instigated by excessive commercial exploitation or was it, as Leary and Brommel state, something greater?

Roszak further emphasises the corrupting nature of drug abuse in the 60s by portraying it as nothing more than excessive self-indulgence, "There is a word we have to describe such fastidious immersion in a single small idea and all its most trivial ramifications, such precious efforts to make the marginal part stand for the whole of culture. The word is "decadent."" This is a sweeping statement which pretty much condemns the use of psychedelics in the 60s as corrupting and immoral. He then wages into more reasons why the 60s drug culture was immoral and selfish, identifying the criminality of the movement, "Money is still what it takes to survive in an urban environment, even if one is only eking out a substance... whatever else they may take themselves to be, the hippies constitute, willy-nilly, 'the biggest crime story since prohibition'." This is further exacerbated by his focus upon the menacing drug lords and capitalist motives hidden behind the 'flower child' exterior, "their communities have nevertheless become a market more and more dominated by hard-nosed entrepreneurial interests that have about as much concern for expanding consciousness as All Capone had for arranging Dionysian festivals." Thus, Roszak brings to prominence the seedy, unflattering aspects of the 60s drug culture and exposes it as, most prominently, an illegal drug trade with capitalist motives and self-indulgent tendencies.

This was an immediate reaction (published in 1968) from the extreme right and aimed to paint an unflattering political portrait of the era. Roszak was adamant in his ideals and presented a strong front against the drug culture of the 60s. This effectively portrays the drug abuse of the Sixties as a chaotic regression in American morals. Evidently, Roszak's history is starkly different from Leary and Brommel's view of drug use and is a more radical approach than DeGroot.